


The King is But a Man

by 1f_this_be_madness



Category: Labyrinth (1986)
Genre: Abandonment, Changelings, Fairies, I always feel for him at the end of the movie, I don't know why...maybe this will clarify, Kidnapping, Stolen Child, allusions to untimely death, an origin story for Jareth, fey magic, horribly sad and heartbreaking, just like him
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-09
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-04-08 11:00:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 944
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4302255
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1f_this_be_madness/pseuds/1f_this_be_madness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jareth never understood WHY he was so different from the goblins with whom he lived and over which he ruled. Until he learned the truth one day whilst gathering slime in the marketplace.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The King is But a Man

He never knew why he was different.

For as long as he could remember, Jareth did not look like the other goblins. He didn’t have the same lumpy nose or greyish brown purple skin; he didn’t possess hair in strange places or the smell of rotten eggs and dirty socks that often clung to his fellows. He didn’t have pointed teeth. His teeth were small and even and white and square; his hair was long and white-cream-yellow and did not grow out of his nose or in his ears; his limbs looked like pale thin sticks and at the worst he smelled of salty sweat. But he had magic. 

He could make an entire world appear inside a soap bubble, and he could teleport himself or others across the kingdom with a single word. He could create beautiful clothes and toys and mazes that any child would delight in; he could make living golems from the imaginations of others; shining gifts of endless boxes within one another, swords and shields and dazzling jewelled dragons; and, if he was angry enough, snakes and sleeping draughts and poisons and luscious fruit that was rotten in the middle. He could disguise himself so cleverly that no one would know it was he—Jareth often explored the kingdom in this way, learning others’ secrets—so that he could use such knowledge to benefit himself. He dressed in dark colors with thousands of shining facets that sparkled and glittered when he moved. He wore high-heeled leather boots to tower over everyone else, though he was already uncommonly tall for a goblin. 

But soon enough he discovered that he WASN'T a goblin.

He found out in a roundabout way, from an old goblin matron who was speaking to her friend. Neither one knew that he could hear—he often wore a voluminous cloak and made his nose bulbous and grey, hunching down and folding in upon himself so that he could become a simple goblin woman gathering slime and sludge and poisonous herbs from the cracks between paving stones. He gleaned a lot of secrets that way.

On this day, the first goblin mentioned to her friend: ‘That fey child. He is growing strong and powerful—and frightening. He will be great one day, greater far than one such as he would ordinarily be.’ A fey child? What is that? Jareth wondered. 

‘How d’ye know he is fey?’ the second goblin asked. 

‘His eyes—one blue and one brown—are the mark of a changeling. A child whose family tossed him away with a single simple wish: that the goblins would take him. And he has been here among us ever since.’ Jareth freezes, a feeling of icy cold piercing through his heart. 

‘That is why he grows so tall and thin, why his hair is of spun white-gold, and why his powers are of no ordinary sort?’ the other asked. 

‘Yes. No one in his family ever took back the wish or came to find him in the castle beyond the goblin city. Thirteen hours we waited—the very number, no more and no less, those are the rules—before transforming him into one of us.’

But why didn’t anyone come after him? Didn’t they care what happened to him?! Jareth has frozen, his heart pounding and palms sweating, fiercely straining to listen. ‘Oh wait, I forgot; a girl did come. His sister, or cousin, I think. But she gave up after she fell into the first ubliantum. She forgot about him and it and everything.’ Oh horrible. Horrible, horrible, horrible. How could they have done this to him? Left him in a place where no one would ever really truly understand him or look like him or act like him…why had they wished him taken in the first place?! Would he ever learn??? Jareth resumed listening to the two goblin ladies but he only tuned back in in time to hear, ‘Pity—what a pity,’ before they started talking about the resources for boiling and straining clothes that had fallen into the Bog of Eternal Stench, or whether such garments should simply be burned. 

After such a revelation, Jareth ceased trying to find why else he was so different from the goblins. Only in his dreams did he create magnificent masquerade balls, filled with glorious persons dressed in finery, wearing horrid masks yet beautiful beneath, tall and lean as he, with long flowing tresses of gold and red and brown and black; smooth skin of various soft shades, so unlike the rough tones of the skin of goblins. He danced and swayed and held court among the denizens of his dream world who would always be there for him, because as the outside world falls down, what else is there to do?

He first learned of the girl when she frolicked in the meadow, chanting changeling magic from a dusty old book of fairy tales. Little did she realize how real they were. He saw her world, through her eyes, and recognized the pain and resentment she felt towards her stepmother and Toby, her baby half-brother. Toby, a tubby little child with big blue eyes, watched everything and squalled. Jareth felt a stab of—what was it? Pain? Empathy? Kindred spirits, he and that boy. The Goblin King recognized this the more he learned of her, the lovely girl who knew of his world and could somehow control it. Jareth had never felt this way before, but he knew he would do anything for this girl—taking the boy so much like himself to learn to love—so that he would be needed to rule over her.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this piece comes from William Shakespeare's history play Henry V; Act IV, Scene i: "...I think the King is but a man, as I am: the violet smells to him as it does to me; the element shows to him as it doth to me". And later in the same speech is a quote that describes Jareth's acts in Labyrinth perfectly--"...though his affections are higher mounted than ours, yet, when they stoop, they stoop with the like wing."
> 
> Thanks to David Bowie and the cast of Labyrinth for unnerving me and scaring the daylights out of my brother when we were young children...and by extension, I suppose I must thank my uncle for bringing that film to our house and watching it with the two of us.
> 
> God bless David Bowie. He is a fabulous man and a perfectly unique individual.


End file.
